How to Make an Anglican Rosary

Beliefnet presents a gallery on how to make Anglican prayer beads written by "Bead One, Pray Too" author Kimberly Winston.

How to Make an Anglican Rosary

By Kimberly Winston

The word rosary means a garden of roses. The Anglican rosary was created in the 1980s by a group of American Episcopalians seeking a contemplative practice of their own. The Anglican rosary begins with a cross, which leads to an invitatory bead, with which we invite the presence of God. It continues into a circlet of four cruciform beads – one for each branch of the cross – that divide 28 weeks beads into four groups of seven – one for each day of the week. Jesus is memorialized in the sum of the beads and the cross -- 33 – one for each year of his earthly life. Each of these is assigned its own prayer, and all are connected by uncounted spacer beads that carry our fingers from one counted bead and its prayer to the next.